THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

The Erotic Professor

Money and the murky boundary of teaching and sex

Every few years an essay appears that treats the question of sexual harassment in the
academy as an occasion to muse on the murky boundaries of teaching and sex. While
a staple of the genre is the self-serving apologia for an older male harasser, the authors
are not always old or male. And though some defend sex between students and
professors, many do not. These latter writers have something finer, more Greek, in
mind. They seek not a congress of bodies but a union of souls. Eros is their muse,
knowledge their desire. What the rest of us don’t see — with our roving harassment
patrols and simpleminded faith in rules and regulators — is the erotic charge of
education, how two particles of mind can be accelerated to something hotter. In our
quest to stop the sex, we risk losing the sexiness. Against the discourse of black and
white, these writers plea for complexity: not so that professors can sleep with their
students but so that we can speak openly and honestly about the ambiguities of
teaching, about how the most chaste pedagogy can generate a spark that looks and
feels like — maybe is — sexual attraction.

I call this genre The Erotic Professor.

The latest addition is Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran’s "The Erotics of
Mentorship," which recently appeared in the Boston Review. Like many practitioners
of the genre, Figlerowicz and Ramachandran are professors of literature. (You’ll
never find a professor of chemistry or demography among the authors of such pieces.)
Also like many practitioners, they have a high estimation of the academy’s sexiness.
"There are perhaps no places more vulnerable to the intertwining of work and
romance," they tell us, "than colleges and universities." That belief, of course, reflects
the happenstance of their being in the academy rather than any empirical comparison
of the academy to other workplaces. The office romance is a ubiquitous feature of the
culture, after all, its settings as various as a bar (Cheers), a detective agency
(Moonlighting), a paper company (The Office), and an insurance firm (The
Apartment).

Figlerowicz and Ramachandran also have a high regard for the sexiness of the
denizens of the academy: "a defining characteristic of university life is the
entanglement of stimulating ideas and charismatic people." As the essay proceeds, it
becomes clear who those charismatic people are: professors. This is the erotic teacher
as seen by the erotic teacher. When Figlerowicz and Ramachandran write that
"students have often felt a visceral thrill in their stomachs when fired up by a new
passion that also happens to be exemplified by a powerful teacher," they are thinking
of what they felt when they were students. "Many of us," they admit later, "look back
on our charismatic teachers as beacons."

What makes sex an ever-present

possibility for the erotic professor is the
easy rapport of people with money.
One of the conventions of the genre, in fact, is for the erotic professor to imagine what
her students must be feeling by reference to what she once felt, and then to state that
feeling as if it were a universal law ("intellectual magnetism, a notoriously protean
force, often shades into erotic attraction"), scarcely noticing that when she had that
feeling, she was a student on her way to becoming a professor. What about the student
on her way to becoming an HR rep? Or an accountant?
The question never arises because the real shadow talk of the erotic professor is not
sex but class. Figlerowicz and Ramachandran teach at an elite university: Yale. Many
erotic professors do. Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, was a
professor at the University of Chicago. William Deresiewicz’s "Love on Campus"
was published in The American Scholar in 2007, when he was a professor at Yale.

As someone who does not teach at such a university, I am always struck by the
coziness of the setting. "We remain uncomfortably aware," write Figlerowicz and
Ramachandran, "of having sought out meetings in hallways and over drinks after
inspiring lectures in which the excitement of conversation was clearly tinged with
something more — a shiver of heightened awareness, intensity, and passion that was
both intellectual and sexual, perhaps sexual because intellectual."

Here’s how that passage scans at Brooklyn College — where I teach — a CUNY
campus that, despite the resolute interventions and dedication of our new president
and vice president, remains undone by decades of malign neglect by the state. In the
lecture hall, there are chairs that can’t be sat on, a light fixture that does double duty
as a graveyard for insects, and grimy windows you can’t see through. The view opens
up in the hallways, but that’s because holes and gashes in
the ceilings and walls offer portals to an unseen world. Timeless truths
are stopped clocks. The only thoughts about sex are in the graffiti on bathroom stalls,
next to toilets that are less broken than deconstructed. As my friend in the philosophy
department, Samir Chopra, once remarked, "The most unsexy thing I’ve done in my
life is teach in a Brooklyn College classroom."

The greatest luxury of the erotic professor, however, is the plentitude of her time —
something none of these writers, with the exception of Deresiewicz, who devotes all
of a sentence to it, seems to notice. Jane Gallop’s Feminist Accused of Sexual
Harassment, another contribution to the genre, is shocking not because of the sex she
reports with her students but because of the hours of shopping trips, dinners, movies,
drinks, and tennis games with them. One student approaches Gallop after the second
class of the semester, begging to talk. Gallop asks her to come to office hours the next
morning. The student insists on an immediate audience. Gallop relents. What is so
pressing that it can’t wait till morning? The student wants to ask Gallop to be her
adviser. Gallop isn’t irritated; she’s ecstatic. It’s 9:30 at night.

The teaching load at a CUNY senior college is currently 4/3; at our junior colleges,
it’s 5/4. My first semester at Brooklyn College, I was on campus at 8:30 a.m. and
didn’t leave until 10 p.m. — not because I was shooting the breeze or doing research
but because I was teaching all day. At any given moment, professors may be teaching
anywhere from 100 to 200 students, with no teaching assistants. More than half of
our students work, and the majority of them more than 20 hours a week — just to
cover tuition and living expenses, sometimes to support their families. They don’t
linger in the hallways; they rush to the next class and then to the subway, hoping to
get to work on time. That’s one reason why many on the faculty have to beg, even
require, our students to meet with us. The expectation that student and professor talk,
much less commune, is not widely shared.

What makes sex an ever-present possibility for the erotic professor — something to be
embraced, according to Gallop; something to be held in tense abeyance, according to
Deresiewicz, Figlerowicz, and Ramachandran — is not only these vast tracts of time
but also the cultural code, the easy rapport, of people with money, whether they have
it or teach it. Unlike most students at CUNY, the erotic professor’s students come to
her with enough cultural capital to know how to acquire and accumulate more. The
student pays for access; the professor provides it. It is a communion of the knowledge
class and the ruling class, a marriage of mind and money rather than of souls.

"I ntensity" is a word that appears often in these writings. It’s inevitably set

against, as it is in Figlerowicz and Ramachandran’s essay, a mode of university

"governance" that is "shaped by corporatized risk management and simplistic codes of
conduct." The enemies of intensity are "institutional channels" and "clear solutions,
sharp rules, or a tidy legalistic pathway." Though the claimed patrimony is Greek, the
idiom is a shopworn romanticism. What the erotic professor is in anguished protest
against is not prudery but sterility. What she desires is variety and vitality. Nothing
wrong with that, of course, though I could do without the purple prose and monotony
of the complaint. For all the discontent with the uniformity of the academy, the set
pieces of the genre — Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and Alcibiades, and so on — are
remarkably consistent. But what most gets overlooked in these longings is how bound
up they are with elitism.
Intensity here is a sign for exclusivity, the exclusivity of the student-professor bond at
its most fertile and febrile. The union of souls is almost never depicted as a collective
affair, a swelling chorus of many voices. With the exception of Gallop, whose sense
of the collective is palpable, even democratic (formerly at such places as Rice and
Dartmouth, she now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), there are
no orgies — intellectual, that is — in these texts. You’d never know the erotic
professor has more than one student. The bond is always a dyad.

No writer was more attuned to the conflation of energy and election in the classroom
than Muriel Spark. Her fictional creation Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher of intensity if
ever there was one, is filled with contempt for what she calls "this educational
factory" that is the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. She sees herself as "a leaven in the
lump." A poster on the walls depicts a gray Stanley Baldwin, Britain’s longstanding
Conservative leader, with the caption "Safety First." But "safety does not come first,"
Brodie tells her girls. "Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first." Art and philosophy
are the most sacred subjects, the highest calling; science is the lowest, the stuff of jobs
and Bunsen burners.
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Brodie is an erotic teacher. (She’s also a devotee of Hitler and Mussolini.) She doesn’t
sleep with her students; she arranges, or tries to arrange, for one of them to sleep with
the school’s art teacher, her former lover Teddy Lloyd. But Brodie’s Eros is not sex; it
is elitism. "All my pupils," she says famously, "are the crème de la crème." By all her
pupils, Brodie means the ones she has selected, the six girls of "the Brodie set." When
a seventh girl tries to join the set, Brodie gently shoos her away. That’s how her girls
"feel chosen."
Must intensity entail election, exclusivity, and elitism? My instinct as a leftist is to say
no. Our project is equal freedom, excellence for each, not desolation for all. There’s
no reason every student shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of close mentorship. The aim
should not be to tear down Harvard but to lift up Brooklyn College. Nothing but the
best for the working class.

But that’s easy to say, particularly for the erotic professor, whose assumptions of an
ambient plenty remind me of Plato’s observation, in another dialogue, that the reason
we don’t value water, despite its being the most useful and necessary of things, is that
it is so abundant. Economists call this the diamond-water paradox. When resources,
like time or attention for students, are scarce or in high demand, we don’t take them
for granted. To paraphrase what Voltaire is supposed to have said when asked by the
Marquis de Sade to attend a second orgy: Once is philosophy, twice is exhausting.

Lauren Berlant, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is one of the few
writers to confront the challenge of intensive mentoring amid neoliberal scarcity.
What’s so bracing about her 1997 essay, "Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy,"
is the difficulty of her questions — and her refusal of answers. To create the material
conditions and teacher-student ratios that are necessary for a democratized intensity
would require a redistribution of resources from wealthier and private to poorer and
public institutions. For students to arrive at college with the skills and cultural capital
that are necessary for the intensity the erotic professor envisions, there would have to
be a redistribution of resources at the secondary and elementary-school levels. There’s
a reason radical democrats are called levelers. Both transformations would entail a
renovation of society so complete, so radical and disruptive, perhaps even violent, it’s
no surprise material realities rarely intrude upon these conversations.

Conservatives like Allan Bloom are straightforward about the question of inequality
and social class: Erotic teachers are for gentlemen only. Erotic professors on the left
avoid the issue entirely. If forced to address it, they would have to explain how their
vision could be scaled to accommodate the needs of millions of students or perhaps
concede that their vision may be as exclusive as Bloom’s.

That exclusivity goes beyond abundant resources; it encompasses the kind of student
the erotic professor attracts and cultivates. "The students I most care about," says
Gallop, are the "students who want, in some way, to be intellectuals or academics like
I am." Bloom’s most prized student is a philosopher in training. This may be the
reason the erotic professor’s thoughts so often turn to sex: She sees in her students an
opportunity for reproduction, not biological but vocational. If there is going to be a
democratization of intensity, letting go of that kind of student may be the most
difficult redistribution of all.
But even if we resolved these questions of distribution and gave every student an
erotic teacher, would that be our educational ideal? Surely one of the reasons the
erotic professor’s prose is so purple is the Schwärmerei of these relationships, the
humid attention that follows each soul along its pilgrimage to a Ph.D. Isn’t there
something to be said for a lessening of intensity, the maintenance of a healthy distance
and boundary between two people who are, in the end, unequal in position and power?
Speaking only for myself, I knew nothing about — and got nothing from — my most
inspiring professors in college beyond what they said in lecture, wrote in books, or
commented on my papers. That was all the intensity, all the soul, I wanted. Or needed.

W here I do see the demand for personal attention to my students — and

seek to furnish the supply — is in their writing. But my focus is on the writing, not the
writer, even as I’d like to think that my efforts help students acquire a sense of inner
clarity and outer force. That attention to writing involves tremendous involvement and
care, but it lacks the hothouse energy of romance. It is more workmanlike than erotic,
more attentive to craft than soul.

If that seems too formal and cold, perhaps we should democratize intensity through
other, more collaborative and collective means. Why must all the intellectual energy
circulate between student and professor? Why not between students? Gallop’s text can
be disturbing, so breezily dismissive is she of the differentials and abuses of power,
including her own. But there are passages of almost lyrical beauty where she describes
the fellowship of knowledge and discovery she experienced as a young feminist in the
early 1970s. In those moments, you can see, feel, the Eros of her learning. But the
most glaring fact about that Eros is how few professors take part in it, and those who
do are equal collaborators in a feminist experiment in which roles like professor and
student don’t matter. It reminded me of my own experiences as a union organizer in
graduate school, which was the most vital and charged classroom of all — perhaps
because there were no professors in it.

Whatever our model of teaching — the distance that I believe is necessary between
professor and student or Gallop’s democratic collective of equals — the discourse of
the erotic professor does not serve us well. Not because of its sexual overtones,
though I’m still unclear why people find these boundaries between pedagogy and sex
so difficult to navigate. (Then again, I’ve never gotten a chili pepper on Rate My
Professor.) No, the problem is the dyad itself. If two lovers is your model of the
relationship between professor and student, there simply won’t be enough love to go
around.

Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City
University of New York’s Graduate Center. Next year he will be a fellow at the
Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, working on
an intellectual biography of Clarence Thomas.